


A Wonderful Thing

by bodysnatch3r



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Andalusian Gondor, F/F, Hunnic Rohan, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 14:29:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20391214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: After her battle with the Wraith, Éowyn heals slowly. By her side, Faramir, last surviving child of Denethor II, helps her every step of the way, while also learning how to heal her own grief. Together, they find the beauty of the world which waits just beyond the rain.Trigger Warnings: Discussion of depression and grief, graphic depiction of a sky burial.





	A Wonderful Thing

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the TRSB 2019, this fic was an absolute wonder to write. Thank you so much for Iza's input and support, and for her wonderful art that helped this story come to life as it did. Based on [this](https://piyo13sdoodles.tumblr.com/post/187336589871/and-some-more-art-for-the-reverse-bang-with) wonderful piece of artwork.

It is the rain that wakes Éowyn. She feels it in her restless, grey-white dream before she hears it, the shadows of the drops on the opaque glass. The sound breathes her awake, and she emerges bit by bit, inch by inch, her body welcomed again in its shape. Her arm hurts, her body surrounding the sharp pain still there, in her bone, with a heavier throb of its own. She moves slowly, from onto her back to onto her side, the good side, slowly as to not feel the bones more than they are already asking to be seen. She turns with her pain as her cradle, a cove to hide herself in until she is less scared to breathe without her armour on.

Éowyn sees Faramir asleep in the chair she had left her in as she drifted off. Her hands are folded in her lap. Her head falls forward slightly. She breathes, softly, a cadence of silk against the beads of the rain. Éowyn watches: she does not dare rouse her or speak her name or call her, this friend she's made. First word to call her, first light: this friend already curled around her heart.

When Faramir wakes, and winces at her stiff back, Éowyn does not pretend she was not looking, does not shy away from the new sapling love the same way she never hid from the violence. She looks. Her eyes are bright in a still-ashen face, and they do not leave Faramir's hands or her face. Faramir blinks back the dream she was having, the smoke and the heat, feels it melt off the white stone walls, the grey sunlight catching twin jewels in her eyes of the same colour, and she rolls her shoulders, and then finally smiles. Éowyn's own smile only nudges briefly against the contours of her pain, and it is smaller than Faramir's, and it can be hidden in a hand, hidden underneath a heart. The moments of the smile always last the longest, a dipping point, a point of breath. Not sacred yet, not holy, but on their way to be. Not yet. Faramir is only _friend_. And yet she said. She said, she said. She said, _I do not believe that any darkness will endure_. And now it is light. And now the world has come to beauty on an eagle's wings. And she had called her healed. Éowyn sits up, slowly, a hand that's not her own to support her as she moves. A crack of thunder and its bright whip of lightning breaks across the back of the clouds, great beasts of burden trudging across the planes. Galloping. She hears the sound of the growing storm and it is hooves.

The earth cleanses herself. She is reborn, after the blood. She is divested of the ash and the soot. She breathes. In every emerald leaf and silent, curious foal, the land becomes again what it was always meant to be, and the pain drips away like blood in the rain.

Faramir sits on the edge of the bed. Her hand rests on Éowyn's knee, the touch mitigated by the slight scratch of the wool blanket. Éowyn remembers the kiss, and knows that if it were to happen again right now it would kill her. She is the foal in the field. The quiet, curious thing, trembling on legs it knew how to run on the moment it was born. She is here, in this healing pain she is still shrouded in. Faramir sits, and Éowyn thinks of how it felt to kiss her, what it held behind the heart. Tenderness for something made like her, when she has spent so long hewing herself into a sword, and the hand that yields it. So she thanks the blanket, like a shield, and wonders at the gold embroidery on Faramir's sleeve.

“Would you walk with me, Lady Éowyn?”

“In the rain?”

“The halls of the White City are filled with song, regardless of the rain.”

What little wondrous steps the newborn foal must take. Every step like flying. Every step like a leap above a gorge. Learning how to walk, again. All the courage Éowyn must take into her hands, a different kind of courage. She was used to staring death in the face, laugh at it with a bloodied heart and beg for it to come. She called that bravery, and it was the bravery of the life in too much pain. Now her bravery has changed, changed with her healing heart and the scared newness found in her tenderness. She didn't know it was there, and she still does not know if it will stay. But Faramir, regardless of the turmoil in Éowyn's heart, still stands to give her the space to stand, and still waits for her beside the door of her chamber, and still holds out her hand for Éowyn to hold.

The lightest of touch, like a dusting of snow. Both of their palms are calloused, marked by the violence and the time spent with that violence, close, intimate like kisses. Faramir runs her thumb along the back of Éowyn's hand, and lightly pulls her closer, shoulder to shoulder. A gaze without a touch, a light press of hearts to minds, of minds to hearts. It sends Éowyn's own breathing into her throat, in a way that she feels makes her tremble, makes her understand herself less with each passing day and find something more, new, underneath it, something she is not yet ready to see eye-to-eye. It waits, for now, in the small moments in between her heartbeats. She finds a little bit more of it as Faramir guides her out of the Houses of Healing. The rain falls, and they stand momentarily outside, under the vaulted portico. Despite it, the sound of laughter, of song, running lightly in the streets alongside the children, playing in puddles. Faramir sees Éowyn and her eyes she still does not know how to open, but can still listen to the song behind them.

Éowyn watches the children play in a way she had not thought she ever will. All her life, the shadow of dark war. All her life, the clouds gathering to the East. And now the clouds have burst, and the future comes roaring down from the sky. A future to construct and build, made precious all the more by the smell of warm soil underneath the hands, and the effort of hoisting up the wood beams yourself. To build anew.

“What troubles you, my lady?” Faramir's voice asks her. It makes her turn to her again, the smell of rain rich in her throat.

“What is to come.”

Vast and terrible. So unknown she can barely make its shape out in the fog around the bend. Her answer curves Faramir's lips upwards, again, and she almost finds it hard to remember that whatever may scare her, Faramir does not know it, is privy only to what her answer may be, can only know what she's shown. Let slip like drips of water from melting ice, through the cracks in the rock, to burn away at the harshness bit by bit. She sees the rock as Éowyn sets it aside, but not the river. Just the drippings of the river.

Faramir reaches across them. Unexpected, like every little gesture she makes, but still bright and purposeful. Faramir touches her cheek, lightly, and then her fingers travel upwards. She feels herself tensing albeit briefly under the touch, and then Faramir tucks a lock of Éowyn's hair behind her ear. The fingers, again, to her cheek.

“You will have me beside you, to face it. When it comes. Whatever it may be.”

She does not think it will be as terrible as Éowyn fears, and Éowyn does not know yet how to explain to her that it is not because it will be bloody that she fears it. The war has ended. There is no new horror to endure. There is this: a healing of sorts, in the rain as it falls on her head, and the blank slate it gives her. She forces herself to return Faramir's smile. Without war, she doesn't yet know who she is, just that she is.

Faramir's hand falls from her cheek to take Éowyn's hand in her own. “Come, Lady Éowyn. There is something I wish to show you.”

They walk hugging the walls, the awnings giving them slight respite from the crashing of the rain. Clouds Faramir knows that soon will clear, leave the earth shining and new. Breathing in clean air, breathing out new hope. She has sunk her nails into this thought: clung to it, this thought that there is nothing beyond the mountain range but hope. It has proven true, up until now. The war, won, and Éowyn beside her. What hope there is, sprung like new grass from barren earth. She leads Éowyn across the gardens, up the marbled stairs. A cobbled street.

The marble glistens, dangerously slippery, a great beast of white under the falling rain. Almost asleep. Resting, like so many of her men and women, as her wounds are treated. The walls, rebuilt slowly, that scar like bodies do. And the healer-king, now returning, and with him this new terrible, beautiful day. There are children playing in the puddles, the laughing sons and daughters of courtiers and servants, and _the music_, that now grows louder after the quiet of the Houses of Healing, that the water echoes, that ricochets against each puddle and gallops, gallops, gallops around them, on new legs, newborn of hope. Faramir sees her city reborn.

Éowyn lets herself be pulled, towards something, towards everything. For the first time in so long, she abandons herself to a tide without fighting, without needing the resentment to keep her above water. She is powerless and she is allowing herself this powerlessness: when Faramir's tide pulls, her feet barely touch the riverbed. She walks beside her, their hands tangled, across stairways and under the cover of marbled walls and brickwork. The patchwork of the inner city, carved of hidden gardens and high vaulted rooms, and the rain all around them, and then only in sound, against windows and roofs and outer walls, as Faramir leads her deeper and deeper into the circles that make this white citadel. Inside.

Faramir walks past the rooms that were her father's, and the rooms that were her brother's, and the rooms that were her mother's. She walks by them and leaves their heavy pain behind the doors, where it can rest for now, without the need for agony. At the sight of Éowyn's eyes, the agony is background noise, no louder than the rain and the music carried by the puddles. Faramir opens the door, and Éowyn knows suddenly she is being led into Faramir's heart. Into her chambers, into the flowers of her inner world.

Faramir guides her to sit upon a chair. The smooth mahogany under her hands reminds her of her mother's yurt and she feels the wood and remembers the smell of the leather walls. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again Faramir is sat across from her, a lute with a slight neck and a round body. Faramir tunes it, resting on her knee, and then when she looks up she sees Éowyn as she watches it intently.

“We call it oud.”

“Oud.” Éowyn repeats, letting the word embrace the front of her mouth with its wide, wonderful vowels and its ending stop, the flight of a bird and its sudden landing on a branch.

“I wrote something for you. A poem.”

Here she is, then. Receptacle for sweetness. Receptacle for a beautiful thing, when she's made herself so ugly and so splintered. She folds her hands in her lap, and wants to speak, make present the misery inside her she still feels. Her head is such a roar, an incomprehensible, unreliable thing. First she feels, and then she thinks, and then she feels again and it is something different. Her heart aches more than her arm ever has. She swallows, she shifts in her seat.

“A poem?”

“Yes.”

She is about to say something more, a response, something dictated by the panic. A beautiful thing and it carries her name. Éowyn is about to speak, but then Faramir's fingers begin to dance, and Faramir's voice soars. In the rain, and the sunlight just beyond the rain, her voice becomes something beyond. Almost like the ancient magic that Éowyn knows of in song.

This friend she's made. This friend who wrote her magic, woven from rain, now falling, and pain, music that grows quieter and quieter.

“What does it mean?” Éowyn asks.

Faramir smiles a smile Éowyn had not yet seen her smile. Lopsided, almost a grin. She is still holding the oud. “It is a tradition of poetry brought to us by the Middle Men. We sing it in the Elven-tongue, now.”

“But what does it _mean_?”

The oud reverberates slightly when Faramir sets it down, back into its case on the floor, the body vibrating light, dusting of snow. She stands and Éowyn tenses when she kneels before her, hands on hers. Faramir's touch is a light thing, holds the future on its surface. A dusting of ice on the water, ready to be cracked. She rubs her thumb along the back of Éowyn's hand, and Éowyn says nothing. Cannot bring herself to say anything. Sits, and watches, and feels. Overwhelmed by the touch, she watches their hands connected in her lap, until Faramir's other hand comes to her cheek, and lifts her head, slowly, slowly, until their eyes meet.

“So much coldness. So much light, beneath such coldness. There is nothing for you to fear, here, my lady. Fear no longer dwells within these walls.”

The touch of Faramir's lips is light, almost a ghost's kiss. But it speaks, and it sings, and it says, _this is what the poem meant_, this. This.

* * *

Wind, sweeping in from the South, from the mountains that embrace Gondor like arms. In the morning, Faramir had said that it was the White City joining in the weeping, the grief slow to build and slower still to dissipate. And so the city had come, a piece of it, in Faramir's grey eyes and strong, bright hands. Éowyn had let it come. Let it come, on the wings of bright wind, in the wind where Faramir hears a whisper and the dead's name so different from what she knew: here the dead is not Theoden, here he is Noyan. Here he carries the title of Khan, here, in the grass-grey steppe, Éowyn's name changes too, takes flight. Here Faramir has found her to be called Morinubayasqulang, a name fit to her bones, a name fashioned how she was raised, wind in her hair, prayer, prayer underneath the sweat of her horse's coat.

It is only them, and Éomer, and the böö tasked with breaking apart the body. The others, King Elessar, the Lady Galadriel, and many more enough to fill Meduseld, are not privy to this procession. Éowyn walks slowly, Faramir beside her, and Faramir sees her as she met her, weeks ago, lifetimes ago, when she was blood-stained and fractured from steel. Grief, the terrible taste of it, has brought her back to her shadows, has clouded her eyes like glass underwater. But her grief is not the same heart as Faramir's: for Éowyn the grief has already dripped away, is a low ache, a notion more than anything else that Theoden as she knew him is no more, and he is other, something else. Éowyn found before that her grief is so much like an old friend: they gave her father to the birds and the sky, and then her mother, and her aunt, her cousin and now her uncle. She has given her ancestors to the stones, left them to fly into a grey autumn, their soul like ash after the fire, when the earth is coated and it can begin anew. Her grief does not live here, it lived before, when she held Theoden as he passed on the battlefield and knew her by her face and her dark gloty. Now she walks with ash in her heart, and the peace of knowing that the cycle continues, in her blood, in her brother's blood, in the spirits of the dead.

Faramir was not here when they carried Éowyn's cousin from the door of his house, head first, to the hill they are reaching now, bent under the weight of relentless history, teeming with bright, black-eyed vultures. Time soaks the stones, seeps into the black dirt of the grass of winter, time, bright red against the vultures' cries, arched into the shape of history's beginning. Theodred's bones, the stones surrounding them, are still upon the hill. Theoden's bones will join his. Theoden's soul will join the stones placed around them. On the hill, past the slope as it crawls into the plane of the grassland, scarves curl in the wind, whipped by the fluttering of the vulture's wings. Some tattered, some new, they break through the monotone sky in bursts of colour, hanging from ropes strung between wooden poles. They bring the sky closer, bridge the grass with the ineffable clouds. Faramir, as they walk by them, sees them like bird's wings, clearing their way up towards a heaven she will never truly know the way the vultures do. Against the bright blue, the vultures are a stark contrast to the flags, guardians, bright beady eyes. Grey feathers and coloured cloth: messengers all the same. They know: they circle the procession, and wait. Faramir, Éowyn and Éomer stop, but the priests and the body go on.

Faramir turns to Éowyn, and Éowyn turns to her, and the smile she gives her, past the quiet, slow grief that grows slowly lighter, is a smile she would not have been able to give her even weeks before. As the böö, further up the hill, set Theoden down and begin their silent, sacred work, Éomer comes to his sister. Her head is to his chest, his hands to hold her shoulders. Faramir watches, the taste of the smile she saw still lingering in her throat, and the thought, the second thought, that comes after as she sees Éomer holding Éowyn is one of a simple pain, sharper than so many other kind of pains, brought to her heart like raw meat to devour: Boromir, who she was not able to bury save in a dream of freshwater rivers. She feels the bubble, deep, of pain like blood coming to the surface of a cut, and she has to swallow it down. It does not leave, instead blossoms behind her eyes, tears on her face born through blinking. No sobs for this grief she should have already laid to rest. Éowyn breaks Éomer's hold on her, reaches across the small space between them to take Faramir's hands in hers. She presses her forehead to Faramir's.

Grief is different for the two of them, two cultures, two ways of greeting and bidding farewell to the dead. Éowyn has already made peace. Faramir did not have the time to, she had to wage war, and in the quiet nights of Ithilien, the dead would not let her rest anyway. So here is where grief finds her, and here is where Éowyn knows how to nurse her back, how to make the garden of Faramir's grief grow strong, become a fragrant thing. No weeds of ill-processed pain to poison her for years to come.

Behind them, the dull sound of the böö and their blades, the cracking of bones as they dislocate, as they cut. The vultures are beginning to crowd, waiting. In the silence, they bring only the sound of their song for the dead, and that this is giving back and beginning anew, intertwined, a body given and a soul set free to recommence. A body empty, a soul to find its way home.

What was once Theoden is strewn within the circle of rocks now constructed. From lower down the hill, Éowyn sees the birds begin to dive. One, at first, then two and three. Soon, they descend upon the hill together, one body made of so many wings. Éomer is the first to walk down the hill and his sister follows. She does not wait for Faramir nor looks back, over her shoulder. She walks, and Faramir watches the shape of her as she moves downhill. Her raven hair, spread in the wind like the wings of the vultures, and the curve of her shoulders. In the birthing days of spring, she is as beautiful as the melting of the snows, and the light born from the new storms.

Faramir knows she does not wait because she knows there is no need to wait. This, how their love has slowly blossomed. Born like a sapling under snow, like the flower of the White Tree, and nurtured, brought to life and light, by the warmth of their hearts despite the coldness. Éowyn does not wait for her: she does not need to. She knows, just as she knows now the dawn will come again, that the heart they share cannot be broken, not yet. She knows that the love, low and warm, is woven of a million thoughts, and each thought makes it stronger. So she has found this shroud of love, bright love, and she has begun to learn the edges of it. But perhaps she fears it, too, and as the wind sweeps past her shoulders, she thinks of the fear. She thinks of the fear she knows no name for, unlike the fear of death she knows too well, to the point of it being like a balm to drown in.

This fear, the fear of loss. Unlike any names she has ever heard before. Faramir catches up with Éowyn and her brother at the bottom of the hill. They walk back to Meduseld in silence, and are greeted by the open doors to the sounds of a bright feast.

* * *

“We celebrate our dead differently. We wear black in mourning, and we offer drink and food, but we do not gather... At least not so many.”

“He was our Khan. We have come here to remember the glory of his deeds, and the righteousness of his command.”

Faramir nods, her gaze flickering from Éowyn's face to the clothing before them, and back. She has decided to ride, one last time, wear armour one last time. A last battle-song to honour her dead uncle's life, and then her hands will be stained with dirt, not blood. The sweet scent of trees beneath her fingers. Enough of salt. Enough of rusty red.

“Do you wish for me to leave?”

“While I dress? Yes, my Lady. I do.”

The flap of the yurt closes behind Faramir as she leaves, and Éowyn is left with the silence. She lets it, welcomes it, inside her, like smoke from a smouldering fire. She breathes in the smell of home, the wood and the leather, the fire and the horses' sweat. She stands before her mother's armour, her deel and her cuirass, her boots and belt. She closes her eyes.

_Eke, bi tajard. _Mother, I am _home_. Morinubayasqulang walks the land of her ancestors, here to return herself to it, before she leaves it for fair Ithilien. Every piece of her mother's clothing a piece of herself. Every stitch in her side that still burns a sweet, last song. She has given her uncle's body to the birds. She must give herself, her old self, to them also, leave her behind in the bright sunlight, in the dust, in the sound of horses' hooves.

All part of her. Bones of her. New flesh must be grown around them: no longer an animal of pain, but something _else_. Wounded but unafraid. Reborn in the light of the first morning after rain.

“Lady Faramir.”

Éomer calls to her from across the dirt courtyard between his yurt, once Theoden's, and Éowyn's, the one she's standing outside of. He walks towards her in broad strides, Éowyn's same dark eyes and silky black hair, a sharper jaw and the trappings of a khan, in his stern expression and his determined step. He reaches her in quick time. She goes to curtsy, but he takes her by the arm instead, clasped tight, soldier to soldier.

“Never shall my sister's wife need to bow to me. We are family.”

Faramir smiles, an answer to Éomer's own smile as much as it is an acknowledgement of his words. He reminds her of Boromir, brilliant, beautiful, a scion of lords. He moves like Boromir, and laughs like him. He loves like Boromir, which is what hurts the most in a way that risks overcoming her. A wave of missing, always on the brink of crashing down to drown her. She wonders if this is what continuing to live is. Beyond the dead. Beyond her father's quiet surliness and courage in the face of horror. Beyond her brother's broken horn, and the paleness of his face in dreams. Her mother, whose memory she carries in the braids of her hair, intertwined with the soft murmur of the sea.

“I thank you, my lord.”

“Walk with me.”

The stands are already being raised about the field, the people already starting to assemble. Faramir catches a glimpse of Aragorn and his raven-haired wife, and thinks to wave. They are otherwise occupied, speaking to someone she does not recognize, and besides, Éomer leans against the gate, still closed, where the riders will come in and turns to her. A goat's body, headless, lies in the middle of the dirt field.

“I believe this will be my sister's last kok boru. At least for a while. She seems to be otherwise preoccupied. Ithilien, or so I've heard.”

He says it with a smile. Faramir's smile is the same: half caring, half teasing. Éowyn lives in their hearts and it shows.

“My apologies, my lord. I did not imagine she would be so taken with the prospect of Ithilien. Yet she speaks of it fondly, and I cannot wait to take her there.”

Éomer's eyes crinkle, pulled by the wideness of his smile. Over Faramir's shoulder, he sees something or someone. Faramir turns: Éowyn is leading Winfola. It stops her still, bright-eyed. Beneath the fur rim of her hat, Éowyn sees Faramir and smiles. It is a smile that is slow like a fire rediscovering how bright it can burn, creeping up and slowly so. From her heart: it has climbed to her face from her heart.

“My lady,” Faramir says. Low enough she thinks that no one else will hear it. It's too much of a whisper. Too much of the secret language in herself. But Éowyn hears. This is the new dance they have found: the way they're both part of each other's deepest heart. “My lady,” Éowyn answers, dips her head forward. Faramir and Éomer move, to allow the riders access to the gate. “Ride well,” Éomer says, squeezing his sister's shoulder.

Windfola accepted her. Even after the madness of the battlefield and the fear and the horror, when she came to Windfola for her last kok boru, he rested himself in her hands like he always had. He had let her saddle him and bridle him and lead him to the field, and now he was waiting, patiently, for her to mount him. She does, a swift movement, her body remembering what she feared it had forgotten. So much of herself she had felt slipping in the walls of the Houses of Healing. So much of it she had felt hiding somewhere else, now dripped from her heart into Faramir's. It had been a terrifying ordeal, this un-knowing of herself, and in the aftermath she had still found that she was ash-covered and terrified, but beneath it the steel had been tempered. Between her legs, Windfola shivers, breathes. She squeezes his flanks with her knees, directs him to stand beside her teammates for the day. He whinnies, grunts, skittish still a little, but she whispers, soft things, to the horse and to herself who she sees only a year before standing at the top of the hill where Meduseld is. Dressed in white, her dark hair whipping behind her in the wind.

The scared girl she was. She is still here, at the end of the road and behind her, in front of her and to her shoulders. She cannot forget her, will not let her slip away. She was her, once, and she will not let that fade. She would not do that to the girl she was, who was then silenced by her pain and her rage that was only fear under another name, silenced by a world that did not know where she could fit, if she could fit at all. She knows that girl by name, saw her grow: she will not abandon her now that her pain is gone, that the suffering has left her with bright meaning.

Windfola whinnies, and she hushes him, brings him to the centre of the field. The players of each team face each other. She recognizes brave men and women she saw fighting both at Helm's Deep and on the Fields of Pelennor. She knows they see her, too, as their Lady and as the White Lady of Ithilien and, most importantly of all, as their comrade. Like her brother, she fought and bled beside them. Like her uncle, who died beside so many that cannot be here today. The lots for which side of the field their tai kazan will be in are pulled, and she is amongst the first four to enter the field.

She was scared, for a moment, that she wouldn't know Windfola, that he would not know her. Bringing him from the stables to the field was easy enough. Mounting him, too. Yet it is the moment they enter the field together that she knows is the one that matters most. When she will have to push him and he will have to carry her, her urgency becoming his speed, his speed her strength. She eyes the goat carcass in its circle. She will have to catch it and bring it to the opposing team's tai kazan.

The trumpet blares. It begins.

Beneath her, she feels herself kick Windfola's sides, and Windfola, burning, terrible, her heart made flesh, throws himself forward. She feels him move beneath her, and feels herself move as he does, lean down, grab the goat. Now comes the race: her kick, her cry, as she pushes herself and her horse towards the tai kazan, its edges round and smooth, a well with no water.

Beside her run the horses of the living. But if she looks beyond them, past the veil blood and flesh have cast about the world, she sees them also, she sees them all: her ancestors run in her blood, wolves on the steppe, horses let loose in the wind. Her mother first, beside her, wearing the clothes Éowyn is wearing now. And then her father, and Theodred, beautiful and grinning. Beside them, her uncle. His eyes are fire, full of life, forever. In her blood, the hooves of their horses bound a rhythm her heart dances to. She laughs, and the winter falls from her body for good. She laughs, golden in the sun, and breathes the name of her dead. Prayer for the living.

Faramir, standing beside Éomer, watches as Windfola bounds past them, the rival horses close behind him. On his back, Éowyn shines like a newborn sun. Her crop between her teeth, her knees tight, the carcass in front of her, on the saddle, brushing against Windfola's neck. Headless, it lies limp, and she above it grinning past the leather. A face like a warrior's, a warrior who's learned who she is to be now that there are no wars left to fight, and the knowledge, of herself and of the world beyond her, has set her free.

Sweat, sweat down her back and in her hair. Above her, light. And all around her, vibrant, vibrant, roaring like a newborn life: the world.


End file.
